Still

by Charlee Jacob

  He even had a Diane Arbus photo. Jack Dracula, a man who’d taken his personal interest in horror films even further than Pete had. He was covered in 306 tats from scary movies.

  And here these guys were, in a respectable eatery—not some quickee burger where the main stuffing was a mixture of kangaroo meat and mealworms. And they were saying things like,

  Pete: “Franz Kafka once said that ‘…a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ Then what should a photograph do?”

  Dunk: “Margaret Bourke-Vite—who vonce attempted do photograph duh horrors awf a Nazi conzendration camp (vorgive me, Papa) by approachink id vit an artizdic sense—believed dat a link betveen art und duh recordink awf duh vicked zhould nawd be made.”

  Peter: “I don’t agree the link should be avoided. Goya did it. His paintings, Distasters of War, based on horrors he witnessed during the Spanish conflict with Napoleonic France, were documentations in paint. Picasso also did this, highly stylized, with Guernica. The fact that no camera was used other than the human eye, its images recorded in a brain shocked and sensitive, then re-translated through artistic medium via the hands, made it no less a product which memorized history, transfiguring trauma into pictures captured forever out of their terrible reality. They were intended to shake the viewer, also transmitting a sense of the painful poetry that binds us all.”

  Dunk: “Dese are nawd merely dehumanized aftermaht, nawd merely performers in duh blowfly zircus. Nawd tricked-out mutton var alley pirates who peek droo duh burn vard vindows do vatch duh cruzds razp. Dey haff a purpose.”

  Peter: “How does one separate the victim of a violent crime from the blood? How do you remove the pain and damage, declaring these are unnecessary to the history of the outrage? How can anyone insist the crime has to be sanitized of the very things that cry out for justice before we’re permitted to see and try to understand?”

  Diane hunched her shoulders, poured herself another glass of wine, then another. The wine stained her apricot-glossed lips until she resembled one of Dracula’s wives. She tried not to look back at people who stared at them. She wanted to yell, “I’m not into this, okay? I’m not like them! I’m normal.”

  (No fetal veins in my teeth, no dead dick up my pussy.)

  Wait… She’d never had THAT thought… Or if she had, it was from being mortally tainted by Peter. Oh, no…was that a Freudian slip?

  The manager visited their table and bent down to whisper, “Gentlemen, please. We’ve had some complaints. Simply lower your voices. People are eating.”

  “Ya, zorry,” Dunk said, smiling sheepishly. “Vee zhould go do givink prezzints now, ya?”

  The German had a glint in his eyes though as he peered at the manager, which said more. Here, I’ll give you a card var a vree votograph awf Marilyn Manzon gettink a bikini vax.

  Diane gusted a gasp of relief and quickly presented Peter with her gifts. He opened them eagerly. One was a ring with a Christian cross on it. The other was a designer silk tie.

  “The cross is sort of Gothic-styled. The tie is blood-colored. See?” She felt she needed to explain.

  “Just gorgeous, honey. Thank you.”

  “Now mine,” Dunk said and presented him with two packages. One was a copy of the Beyond the Horror Holocaust, an in-depth book about cinéma à l’extrême by Chas Balun, which Pete could tell right away he was going to love. The other was a photograph.

  “Id’s vrom a very rare movie, made in duh 1950s,” Dunk told him. “Id vas reputed do be duh shnuff vilm, but nawd like duh fake vuns vee zaw in duh 1970s.”

  Peter couldn’t breathe, seeing the young girl being strangled in the back seat of a car by some guy in a shiny, striped suit. The camera angle caught her legs wide apart, the head of a baby being born showing between her thighs. By the roll of her pupils to zeros and the shadow over her face—seeming to be cyanic even in the black and white—Peter guessed she was already dead even as the guy continued to throttle her.

  “Is this from Rosaluna?” he barely dared murmur.

  “Ya,” the German replied.

  “I’ve heard of it, naturally. But I never believed the film was real. Just, you know, an urban legend…”

  “Vell, do tell duh druth, I doubt id’s really vrom duh shnuff vilm,” Dunkel admitted. “But, do you like id? Is id a gut vun var your collection?”

  Peter could hardly contain himself. “Yeah! Talk about unusual. I’m holding Hollywood mythology in my hands here.”

  Diane shook her head in disbelief, the single curl she owned sliding across her forehead. Carefully moussed earlier, it suddenly felt greasy, nasty—a brain curd pulsing from a split in the forepart of her skull where a maniac psychiatrist she’d gone to for help with nightmares her husband’s horror collection was giving her had decided to lobotomize her with a tool for dye-punch.

  “Look, Diane, heez zo happy, I bet he could eat id up,” Dunkel pointed out.

  Peter noticed the others in the restaurant straining to see the picture without being obvious about it. Hypocrites.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Pete replied.

  He held it up and licked it. Hoping, gee, none of these were parents of any of his students. All strangers, right?

  There came a taste of ancient developer so bitter it shriveled his tongue on contact and burned down his throat. His eyes watered and he gagged, Mongolian barbecue starting to lurch upward from his stomach on a tide of Shiraz and szechwan pepper sauce. He clenched the photo in one fist and with the other clutched his face.

  Then everything tilted.

  Fade in…

  Black and white.

  Black and white.

  Blackandwhite.

  Color was an intrinsic component reserved for those with a future.

  He was a she, Rosaluna Pasolini, age fourteen. She lay helpless in the back seat of a Detroit Tyrannosaurus Rex, man straddling her pregnant belly, pressing down on the fragile stem of her windpipe. She’d had her charm bracelet around her wrist and slapped her assailant in the mouth, leaving a cross-shaped cut.

  They’d kept her in a filthy room for months, shooting her up with H, doing her over and over until she grew big with child. Men she knew had murdered her father five years before.

  In the car, she grew woozy even as she double- and triple-cramped. She grew too weak to flutter, couldn’t scream, almost couldn’t breathe. And the guy let up, moving backward off her and just out of the car to where another beast worked a big camera on a tripod.

  He wiped at the blood on his face from where she’d sliced him open. He said, “Watch this, sweetheart.”

  He reached between her legs and grabbed the baby’s head.

  The pain became an intense flood from every nerve ending, not just those inside her womb. She tried hard to shriek, the extra pressure—from the inside—on her already damaged windpipe caused it to collapse. She strangled, watching with bulged eyes as her child was ripped from her, then strangled with the umbilical cord. She followed it into the darkness of a tormented, surreal fade-out.

  Black.

  Peter jerked, wild, finding himself back at the dinner table with his wife and Dunk Friedhof. Everyone stared at him.

  “Are you ahkay?” his friend asked.

  “Honey!” Diane had stood up, knocking her chair backward. “Someone do the Heimlich…my husband’s choking… My God!”

  What the fuck just happened? What the fuck?

  Peter shook, struggling to calm down. Telling himself he’d just had a hallucination.

  “Shit, where did you get this picture?” he asked Dunk, his voice a broken rasp. “It’s treated with L.S.D. or something.”

  “I ahnly rezeived id in a package a veek ago. I guess anydink could haff been done do id but… Id might be a reaction do duh developer. Dat auld shtuff vas mighty tokzic. I didn’t actually ecsphect you do tazte id,” Dunkel babbled, putting a hand on Peter’s shoulder and observing him closely, ready to grab his cell phone and dial 911.

&nbs
p; Peter placed the photograph on the table, his hand trembling but held out with a gesture to show he was okay. He even managed a smile. “Well, sure, that was pretty stupid of me, wasn’t it?”

  Diane stamped her foot and snapped, “You scared me to death, Peter Beta.”

  “Sorry, honey,” he told her, massaging his throat, unable to do this to the other sore spot, aware he was in a very public place.

  The manager came toward their table again, frowning a storm as if they’d collectively shit in their salad plates.

  Dunkel quickly took out his wallet and slapped money down to cover the check. “Veer goink, maus. Bitte. Don’t haff ahn aneurizm. Auf wiedersehen!”

  Dunk Friedhof helped Peter to his feet. Diane stalked out alone.

  Peter wheezed, finding it hard to breathe. His legs were rubbery. And he ached between them from a place he didn’t even own. The sensation was passing but not quickly enough. And, although there was nothing in the hallucination which had aggravated his back, now that back itched.

  He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did. That poor girl, Rosaluna, had actually died. He’d experienced her senseless, violent murder.

  The still was from a real snuff film.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 15

  “And the first object he looked upon, that object he became…”

  —Walt Whitman

  Leaves of Grass

  Diane tried to be nice about it. But how to do this and still refuse to speak to him?

  ««—»»

  They’d driven home from the restaurant in silence. Peter turned on the radio because the strained quiet between them frazzled his already freaked-out nerves. Very soon her protracted sigh became a signal telling him he’d better turn it back off.

  Actually, this was okay with him. Turning off the radio, that is. Because he’d not been hearing right, had he?

  Turned it on. First station with a deejay announcing: “So we’ve had three versions of ‘Sh-Boom Sh-Boom’ this year. The Chords, The Crewcuts, and Stan Freburg. Which was your fave? And three versions of ‘Shake, Rattle And Roll’. Joe Turner, Bill Haley and the Comets, and Johnny Ace. Your ever-lovin’ atom of the airwaves, The Axe Man, chooses Stan Freburg from column A and Johnny Ace from column B. So where’s my free eggroll?”

  Whaaa? Changed the station.

  “Let’s hear the last one, dedicated to Johnny Ace himself. Yeah, cats and kittens, this is Christmas Day, 1954, and Johnny died of a gunshot wound late last night. Friends reported he was playin’ Russian roulette. But now that song…”

  Whaaa thuh…? Changed the station again. The song played.

  Changed it and there was some ad.

  “Creature From the Black Lagoon! Now at your local theater.”

  Whaaa thuh fuck? Changed it.

  “…Axe Man. Third year in a row the Holy Bible has topped the bestseller’s non-fiction spot. In 1950 that post belonged to The Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book. In 1951 the honors went to Look Younger, Live Younger. I guess in ’52, ’53 and ’54 they’d finally got the recipe right for both. So, what’s cookin’ up in Heaven, you may ask? Divinity. And all those clouds in the stratosphere, sent up pink-red by the bombs tested in the Marshall Islands. It’s three crazy theoretical minutes to midnight. Well, Shake, Rattle and Roll. We’ll miss ya, Johnny.”

  Diane’s telltale sigh.

  Peter peeked at her sideways. Had she heard what he did? No, she merely protested his lame attempts to fill the awkwardness between them.

  But Peter had distinctly heard: A broadcast from fifty years ago? More or less. Since it wasn’t Christmas now.

  Another reason to suspect the photograph he’d licked—what an asinine stunt—had been tricked up with drugs. Or maybe his dinner was the culprit.

  Then home. And Diane paid the babysitter, went up the stairs, not turning around to wish a final “Happy Birthday,” or even just say “Goodnight.” Peter could tell there wouldn’t be any final present for him from that cold body. No forty spankings on a bare bottom with one to grow on. No lap dance or blow job.

  Diane was really pissed off. She’d been embarrassed, thrown out of the restaurant in front of all those people. Judgemental assholes.

  (Diane was a bit of that, too.)

  Peter knew he should’ve known better. Been more discreet, kept his voice down, not licked a damned snuff film still. But he’d had a lot to drink.

  To top it off with obviously being drugged. How else to explain the vision he’d suffered?

  He followed up the stairs but paused at the end of the hall. Watched her look in on the kids, one at a time, before going off to the bedroom she and Peter shared.

  Normally.

  Not tonight, boy.

  Peter knew better. He wouldn’t be able to apologize to her satisfaction. He’d have to lie there next to Diane, stiff as a dead woman in full rigor, icebox rose/freezer zombie. Feeling the chill creep through the sheets and mattress to overwhelm him until he’d believe he was as good as dead himself.

  Almost dead. (Undead.)

  No, Peter went to his room instead. “Office.” “Hobby realm.” “Nutjob sanctum.”

  What he’d heard Diane refer to as Hell. To her parents and friends, who sympathized and thought her heroic to put up with him.

  “At least he doesn’t expose the children to it,” she’d murmur into the telephone. “No, no. You don’t understand. My fault I guess. Perhaps I make it sound worse than it really is. Pete’s basically a good husband. We all have our little manias.”

  (Making him recall a line from Psycho, when Norman Bates says, “Sometimes we all go a little mad.”)

  There was a futon in Hell upon which he sometimes slept. He’d first have to move albums full of horror film shots. Pictures he’d never had the remotest inclination to lick.

  Then why had he done that tonight?

  What nasty necro negativity gave him such an impulse? In a crowded popular eatery, in front of strangers, half of whom—were they ever to get a look at this room and his collection—would immediately leap to the conclusion that Peter Beta worshipped the devil and sneaked, nude and erect beneath a full length black cloak, into midnight supermarkets to defile the fresh meat at the butcher’s counters.

  They didn’t understand the methodology of deliberately seeking out to learn all the worst secrets, leaving nothing left so horrible it could take him by surprise and defeat him.

  KNOW THINE ENEMY.

  You embraced it, you prepared a feast for it, you acted foolish and bloodthirsty and even evil. You confused it, made it think it recognized you—there in the dark—to cause it to turn to other prey. Maybe you even permitted yourself to love it a little. After all, the familarity it thought it saw in you was really the “it” you saw in yourself.

  Peter locked the door behind him, staring at Hell’s carefully displayed carnage. He might’ve been able to see it with a different perspective, from Rosaluna’s point of view, held down and suffocated by a man with slicked-back hair and a hard-on behind the pleats of his steam-pressed, pin-striped trousers. Her white cotton panties, wet with broken water, down around one swollen ankle.

  Yet Peter didn’t. All he had was aching curiosity. To see if he could reproduce the phenomenon he’d experienced earlier that evening. With another picture. Providing whatever psychotropic substance he’d been slipped hadn’t worn off.

  He needed to understand. To delve. To find out the nature of this mystery. The vision of Rosaluna, of being Rosaluna as she was murdered, had frightened him. He must grab hold of this, get in its gruesome face, and party with it.

  Claim it.

  Banish it.

  He picked up an album. Herschell Gordon Lewis. He opened it at random. Wizard of Gore. A tableau of a lovely young woman non-transcendentally prestidigitated into crotchity, cardiac and cranial kibble. If you looked into the dictionary to locate a definition for ‘crimson’, this was the picture that would be there to greet you.

  Peter felt s
illy. What a dumbass. But he brought it up to his face, smelling the paper, feeling the faintest traces of ink, its smooth surfaces—back and front—as a dry skin between his fingers.

  Stuck out only the tip of his tongue. No more and no less. Barely made contact with the vivid reproduction from the 1960s movie.

  Left behind a very small wet spot, like a revealing dot of moisture at the pants’ fly of some old man who’s a little incontinent, but who’s too proud to wear a diaper.

  Peter waited.

  Nothing happened.

  “Didn’t get enough maybe,” he said to himself.

  Stuck that tongue out farther, tasting shreds of Mongolian barbecue between his teeth. Ran it along the curve of a two-dimensional, demolished dog-food torso. Even tried to imagine: steak tartare, sushi, undercooked chicken, the flavor of a hole in the gums after a dentist’s drill, the cloying tang of a nosebleed reversed down the back of his throat, Diane even—in cunnilingus…a heartbeat prior to the onset of her menses.

  Zombie coldcuts buffet.

  Nothing.

  Pete shrugged, tried not to laugh at himself. Drug’d worn off, that’s all. Or he needed better inspiration.

  On the wall were half a dozen prints from Peter Jackson’s DEAD ALIVE. Yup, the wettest grue ever produced to date. Unpretentiously grisly. What it might look like if a hurricane of blood struck an old folks’ home during a cannibal chainsaw tea time and also a sorority with a dozen roaring lawn mowers running amuck through the showers.

  Peter licked the first one.

  He licked the second one.

  He licked the third.

  He licked the fourth, fifth, sixth, feeling queasy, leaving a trail of saliva like the signature of a crippled snail.

  Nothing times six.

  His back itched, had ever since the restaurant.

  Peter left, crossing the hall to enter the bathroom. He removed his shirt.